Posted on 07/04/2004 8:58:26 PM PDT by neverdem
Illicit sales of uranium from Niger were being negotiated with five states including Iraq at least three years before the US-led invasion, senior European intelligence officials have told the Financial Times.
Intelligence officers learned between 1999 and 2001 that uranium smugglers planned to sell illicitly mined Nigerien uranium ore, or refined ore called yellow cake, to Iran, Libya, China, North Korea and Iraq.
These claims support the assertion made in the British government dossier on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programme in September 2002 that Iraq had sought to buy uranium from an African country, confirmed later as Niger. George W. Bush, US president, referred to the issue in his State of the Union address in January 2003.
The claim that the illicit export of uranium was under discussion was widely dismissed when letters referring to the sales - apparently sent by a Nigerien official to a senior official in Saddam Hussein's regime - were proved by the International Atomic Energy Agency to be forgeries. This embarrassed the US and led the administration to reverse its earlier claim.
But European intelligence officials have for the first time confirmed that information provided by human intelligence sources during an operation mounted in Europe and Africa produced sufficient evidence for them to believe that Niger was the centre of a clandestine international trade in uranium.
Officials said the fake documents, which emerged in October 2002 and have been traced to an Italian with a record for extortion and deception, added little to the picture gathered from human intelligence and were only given weight by the Bush administration.
According to a senior counter-proliferation official, meetings between Niger officials and would-be buyers from the five countries were held in several European countries, including Italy. Intelligence officers were convinced that the uranium would be smuggled from abandoned mines in Niger, thereby circumventing official export controls. "The sources were trustworthy. There were several sources, and they were reliable sources," an official involved in the European intelligence gathering operation said.
The UK government used the details in its Iraq weapons dossier, which it used to justify war with Iraq after concluding that it corresponded with other information it possessed, including evidence gathered by GCHQ, the UK eavesdropping centre, of a visit to Niger by an Iraqi official.
However, the European investigation suggested that it was the smugglers who were actively looking for markets, though it was unclear how far the deals had progressed and whether deliveries of uranium were made.
Wilson, actually, never said that the Bush Admin relied on the forged documents. In fact, Bush probably disregarded them given he mentioned British Intelligence. Both before and after Wilson's NYTImes op-ed the Brits denied their intel had anything to do with the forged documents, and they didn't even know about them when they made there assessment.
Wilson is generally careful to say that he proved that Niger could not have completed a sale of uranium, not that Iraq didn't seek it from them. It's a semantic game lost on the media.
In case you missed this during the holiday.
FYI.
Right next to the "Out and About In The Big Apple" column.
Thanks. If we are attacked by AQ again on our soil, I suspect it will won't even make section A of the NYT....while Katie Couric fiddles.....
Insert the URL of the NYT in the box on the main page and it will spit out usernames and passwords you can use to access the registered members content at the NYT website.
I was just about to ask what page this was reported on. I was confident it wasn't on page 1 above the fold.
FOX was talking about it yesterday .. and Fred Barnes purposefully said, "I guess President Bush was NOT lying about the Niger issue, and Joe Wilson WAS" .. ROTFLOL!!
One more time .. the DEMOCRATS have been PROVEN wrong.
Geeeeee .. how about we call on Teddy to APOLOGIZE to the President.
“…[L]iberals want to have their Nigerian yellow cake and eat it, too.”…Ann Coulter
ROTFLOL! It's not big to the liberals.
It proves the dems were wrong .. which I believe they knew all along .. they were convinced THE PUBLIC DIDN'T KNOW. They certainly don't want the public to realize it was the dems who WERE LYING!!
I hope it's too late.
BTTT!!!
Can someone get this to Rush who is part of his 24/7 group?
He was just replaying a show from a week or so ago and a caller thinks Bush should be impeached on citing this "faulty" intelligence!
But .. The Bush people are not good at "I told you so". They believe it's small and petty. It is .. but in the case of public information regarding the war .. I think they need to change their policy.
The only way they will do that is if we start sending them messages regarding this. And .. reminding the Bush team that it's not petty to expose the NYT attempt to hide this story. Yes, WE ARE AT WAR .. against the democrat spin.
Also .. even on FOX, they pre-empted the President's speech on the economy to run a story about the death of Brando. I was livid and let FOX know .. I was upset that they couldn't wait 5 minutes to report a death. And .. for more than 10 minutes of the President's speech, they had their banner claiming the death .. which meant they were not highlighting what the President was saying. With friends like these ...??
What we've found in Niger, and in Iraq, is that the forgers often use inside information and official forms to make their forgeries more believable, so we've come across forgeries that have real information included in them and in some cases appear to have been done by someone who has seen the original, but the forger simply couldn't get their hands on the originals to sell.
Your analysis is clear-eyed and full of things I wish I'd thought to say. I do wish they would continually point to the NY Times, by name, on the inaccuracies of its stories. Just bring it out in the open. I believe the public has enough distrust of the press that it would be a productive strategy. I think we are still a few elections away from having that kind of Republican running for the Presidency, though. I think the consensus is still to stick with the meekness response to political attacks.
I caught the info from the Financial Times, but this report is important because of the NY Times source and where they hid it.
Intelligence backs claim Iraq tried to buy uranium Financial Times 6-27-04
Intelligence backs claim Iraq tried to buy uranium Financial Times FR Link 6-27-04
Aside from verifying the Administration's belief, I hope this whole thing shows Joe Wilson to be the incompetent partisan moron he apparently is.
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